Look Out the Window

Small houses standing isolated in the darkness. The deep darkness of the surroundings and the light glowing from the houses’ windows make them seem like illuminated objects floating in space, or toy houses. Onodera chose homes in the Tokyo suburbs designed in passing fads of the day—European, Scandinavian, and so forth—that seemed to her to “have a short life span,” and would no doubt be torn down when their owners moved on. These floating boxes of light created trough painstaking masking work in the darkroom are a kind of reversal of the camera obscura (“dark room” in Latin) , evoke the original meaning of “camera” as “room”.